Business strategy and advice from the team at Straight Talk Group… you’re in the right place to get things Straight.

Monthly Archives: September 2014

Your best prospects are people who have purchased from you before. They have already experienced the products you offer as well as the service you provide.

They know you, like you and trust you. (At least they did when they first bought from you… enough, at least, to give you their money.) Hopefully, things haven’t changed. And ideally, your relationship with them has improved.

Research shows that it costs around six times more to acquire a new customer than it does to sell something additional to an existing customer.

So, if nothing else, it makes good financial sense to attempt to sell your existing customers before looking outside for new prospects.

One of the best ways for doing this is to constantly keep in touch with them. Make it impossible for them to forget you. Let them know you really appreciate not only their business, but their friendship, as well.

One of the best and most effective methods is to send a newsletter to your clients. You can publish articles of interest to them, and at the same time, let them know of special, customer-only sales or special items they may be interested in at reduced prices.

If you have a “Referral Reward” program that rewards your customers for referring others to you, you can publish the results in your newsletter. This reminds your other customers about your program, and may entice them to participate in it.

Your newsletter can be published monthly, every two months or even quarterly. It really doesn’t matter. The most important thing, is to keep in touch and get your name in front of them in a welcome, non-threatening way, on a regular, consistent, and predictable basis.

But remember, people don’t necessarily care about what you care about, or your business. They care about what they care about.

So, make sure your newsletter contains items of interest to them. There are several other methods that are effective, and we’ll discuss them in more detail further in our Marketing Mistakes series.

The “Ripple Effect” is one of the most powerful forces in business. And it can affect you both in a positive manner, as well as negatively.

In our last example, we discussed how valuable each of your customers can be to you over time.

We called it the Lifetime Profit Value of your customers. Now, let’s take a look at what the cost could be to you if you lost a customer, instead of gained one.

Let’s suppose for a minute, that you or one of your employees got upset with a customer, and they stopped doing business with you.

No big deal, right? I mean, they were just one customer. And it’s not too difficult to get another one to replace them. And, how much would you lose if they never returned?

In our previous example, $2,000.

But now, let’s take a closer look at how the Ripple Effect could impact that one bad experience between you and your customer.

If that unhappy customer were to tell 12 other people about that experience (or not refer those 12 people to your business), and each of those 12 were to tell six others, the total number of people affected by your one bad experience would total 85. (6 x 12 = 72 + 12 = 84 + the original unhappy customer = 85).

Now, if only 25 percent of those people chose not to do business with you, that comes to 21 people.

If each of those 21 had similar buying habits as your original customer, your total lost revenues would be $42,000! (That’s $2,000 x 21 people.)

$42,000… all from one bad experience!

But what if those figures are way off, and it’s only 10 percent of that amount? That still totals $4,200.

That’s a lot of money for letting one person leave your business unhappy. And here’s an unfortunate thing:

Sometimes people are unhappy and leave, and you don’t even know it

They just get their feelings hurt, feel slighted, or have something completely unexplained happen, and take their business somewhere else. And you never know. However, mostly its because of perceived indifference.

So what do you do about it?

Well, you can’t afford to do anything but treat each of your customers the very best way possible. Give them all the love, care, attention and service you can. Kill them with service. Go overboard. Make it nearly impossible for them to even consider doing business with anyone else but you, regardless of price, location, convenience, or any other reason. Become not only the preferred place to do business with, but the only consideration your customers, clients and prospects have.